Storage Mag Online May 2010

Managing the information that drives the enterprise
STORAGE Vol. 9 No. 3 May 2010
a in st a y
a s b e e nam
RAID h e c t io n for
pro t
of data t it s d a ys
a d e s , bu
de c
m b e re d as
nu
may be nologies and
w e r te ch cting
ne p r o te
r oa c h e s to r g e.
app e m e
b a se d data
disk- P. 13
ALSO INSIDE
5 Focusing on the business of storage
8 Do you really need all that file storage?
22 What’s new in hard disk technology
28 Some relief for storage budgets
37 Time to take control of operational costs
1 40 Tier schemes get help from automation
STORAGE sponsors | may 2010
RE G I O N A L S O L U T I O N P R O V I D E R S
2 Storage May 2010

STORAGE inside | may 2010
The Business of Storage

5 EDITORIAL A storage vendor may have great technology, but
the bottom line is how fit it is for survival in the storage
marketplace. So put down that spec sheet and pick up the
business section. by RICH CASTAGNA
Content Chaos
8 STORWARS The world of file content and NAS storage is
disjointed and fraught with error; we need to unravel the
problem of massive file stores before the issue gets too
big to handle. by TONY ASARO
Alternatives to RAID
13 RAID—in its many variations—has been around for a long
time and it’s done a good job of protecting data. But high-
capacity drives and new performance demands have
spurred development of RAID alternatives. by MARC STAIMER
Hard Disk Drive Technology Trends

22 Although solid state is emerging as a viable enterprise
storage alternative, there’s still plenty of life left in hard
disk drive technology, with higher capacity, greener and
more capable drives on the way. by ALAN RADDING
Storage Managers Can Reach for Their Wallets Again

28 We’re not completely out of the economic woods yet, but
the outlook for storage managers in 2010 is a little brighter
according to our Storage Purchasing Intentions survey. See
what technologies respondents have in their sights for this year.
by RICH CASTAGNA
Taking Control of Storage Operational Costs in 2010

37 HOT SPOTS The deep freeze in IT spending is starting to
thaw and IT organizations are shifting from cost-reduction
mode to cost containment. by TERRI MCCLURE
Storage Tiering Getting More Automated

40 SNAPSHOT In our latest survey, 50% of respondents currently
use a tiered system in their storage shops, about the same as
last year. But more automated methods are being used to
move data from tier to tier. by RICH CASTAGNA
Vendor Resources
41 Useful links from our advertisers.
3 Storage May 2010 Cover illustration by ENRICO VARRASSO

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Data storage spending
editorial | rich castagna
e
The business of storage
A storage vendor may have great technology,
but the bottom line is how fit it is for survival
in the storage marketplace.
intentions survey
Purchasing
VERYONE KNOWS that to stay current, a storage manager needs to keep

“teched up” by reading tons of technical articles, white papers, product
specs and testing results. But to truly keep up with storage these days,
your newspapers’ business pages need to be on your reading list, too.
While poring through all the data we collect with our twice-yearly
Storage Purchasing Intentions surveys (see “Storage managers can reach
for their wallets again,” p. 28), I always find it interesting that storage
managers consistently rank the financial stability of a vendor as one of
Hard disk update
the least important factors—if not the least important factor—in making
a purchase decision. Financial criteria isn’t just ranked low vs. things like
product features, familiarity with the vendor’s other products, tech support
and the perception that a vendor is a leader
in their market, it’s barely a consideration, There’s just too
with typically only 1% or 2% of those surveyed
saying it’s a key consideration. I’m not sug-
much going on to
gesting that purchases should be made only overlook the busi-
on the financial prospects of a vendor, but it
seems that it should figure into the equation
ness of storage and
focus solely or pre-
RAID alternatives
a little more prominently.

There’s just too much going on to over-
look the business of storage and focus solely
dominantly on the
or predominantly on the technical picture. technical picture.
The most obvious case involves taking a
chance on a startup with some hot new technology that nobody else seems
to have. If the technology is a good fit that addresses a key issue, the fact
that it comes from a startup shouldn’t put the brakes on the deal. But
some due diligence is in order, not just to scope out the vendor’s financials
but to consider things like the company’s prospects for survival, why other
Massive file storage
vendors aren’t touting the same technology and if the vendor is addressing
a niche market that may be a bit too niche-y to produce enough revenue
to survive.
Not too long ago, Copan Systems made waves with its massive array of
idle disks (MAID) technology, which has since (in several variations) found
its way into a growing number of other vendors’ products. It’s a cool idea—
cram a lot of drives into a small space and just spin up the ones that are
actually doing some work—that offered capacity and power conservation
5 Copyright 2010, TechTarget. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from
Storage May 2010
the publisher. For permissions or reprint information, please contact Mike Kelly, VP and Group Publisher (mkelly@techtarget.com).
STORAGE
at the same time. Cool tech or not, there was something amiss in Copan’s
plan, and its remains, intellectual property and presumably short customer
list were recently sold to SGI for $2 million, the approximate price of a big,
enterprise-class storage array. (Interestingly, SGI was itself acquired by
Rackable Systems Inc., which picked up the former Silicon Valley star for
only $25 million and then adopted its name.)
But chancy buys with startups aren’t the only financial hazards a storage
intentions survey
manager needs to negotiate. Two of the hottest storage topics right now
are solid-state storage and cloud storage, and while they’re definitely filled
Purchasing
with promise, there are some caveats lurking there. STEC, one of the most
successful solid-state purveyors around, tempered what normally would
have been banner-waving news—record revenues that topped last year’s by
56%—with a rather glum prediction that the first half of 2010 would be far
less spectacular. It’s not that user interest in solid state has already faded;
it’s that EMC, its biggest customer, has a closetful of inventory and isn’t
likely to be buying all that much more real soon. It’ll be interesting to see
what effect (if any) this has on STEC, which has been perceived as a
leader in solid-state storage.
Hard disk update
Going back to our survey, we see that interest in cloud storage services
is fairly high, but here, too, is another case where you truly need to bone up
on the business side of things. For a relatively new technology (or maybe
refreshed technology is a better description), the number of cloud storage
service players is unprecedented (I think there are a billion of them), so the
odds of any one of them going belly up are pretty high. In fact, you can count
on scores of these services shuffling off this mortal coil and disappearing
into the clouds.
You can, of course, take this advice too far and let financial stability
and market position become overwhelming criteria. EqualLogic seemed
RAID alternatives
to be cruising along just fine with good products and happy customers
when Dell ponied up some big bucks for it. But most of the reports I’ve
heard suggest that the new union is working out pretty well. And when
storage system market leader EMC scooped up data deduplication leader
Data Domain—the leader buys a leader—it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t
consider other dedupe vendors, because there are still a lot of solid dedupe
alternatives out there.
If you do storage, you’re probably a tech freak to some degree, so the
thought of having to wade through financial info probably isn’t very appealing.
While you’re not likely to stop reading systems manuals in favor of The Wall
Street Journal, a quick flip through the financial pages once in awhile can’t
hurt. 2
Rich Castagna (rcastagna@storagemagazine.com) is editorial director of the

Storage Media Group.
* Click here for a sneak peek at what’s coming up in the June 2010 issue.
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StorWars | tony asaro
Content chaos
L
The world of file content and NAS storage is disjointed
and threatening; we need to unravel the
problem of massive files stores before
the issue gets too big to handle.
intentions survey
Purchasing
ET’S FACE IT: The big problem with file content is users. People create,
copy, convert, forward, edit, scan and download files all day long. It’s the
Wild West of storage without many controls or restrictions. I remember
one customer who discovered they had 125 copies of a scanned Chinese
menu on their tier 1 storage system. Wild . . .
Look inside any company and consider the
hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of
We’re not only
individuals creating—and recreating—content, creating tons of
Hard disk update
and it’s not hard to see how easily file sprawl

becomes a pervasive and very big problem.
files, we’re creating
More and more companies have hundreds of huge files in the
terabytes or even petabytes of file storage.
In many cases, storage managers have no
form of images,
idea how much file content they have, the video and audio
value of that content, how much it’s costing
them, where it’s being stored or how it’s being
content.
protected.
We’re not only creating tons of files, we’re creating huge files in
RAID alternatives
the form of images, video and audio content. So, lots and lots of files,
including some truly big files, add up to the essentially unchecked
consumption of expensive and hard-to-manage IT infrastructure.
NAS-ty
This brings me to the next big problem with file content: How we store it.
A great deal of file content gets parked on NAS storage systems and al-
though there’s great value in those systems, they create problems for
storage and IT managers. For one, there are only a few vendors that
provide enterprise-class NAS products, so users have a limited num-

ber of options to choose from. Clearly, having more viable products in the
market would foster more competition, cost effectiveness and innovation.
I’ve been talking with some big NAS shops lately, and one of their
biggest challenges is NAS migration. Companies with hundreds of
terabytes or petabytes of NAS file content feel like they’re essentially
tethered to specific NAS devices because the complexity of moving
that data is often perceived as an insurmountable challenge or at least
8 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
far more trouble than it’s worth. One user told me he felt he was being
perpetually held for ransom by his NAS storage.
IS UNSTRUCTURED ANOTHER WORD FOR USELESS?

We often refer to files as unstructured data. By its very nature there’s a
lack of a defining structure to this type of content, so it can be hard for
IT professionals to clearly classify the usefulness of file data. However,
intentions survey
we don’t dare delete it because there’s

Industry studies
Purchasing
always the risk that it will be needed some

day; for most companies, the cost of avoid-
ing that risk is perceived as less than the
have found that
capital cost of buying the gear to store all 60% to 80% of
that data.
Interestingly, industry studies have
unstructured content
found that 60% to 80% of unstructured is never used again
content is never used again 90 days after
its creation. That statistic alone makes
90 days after its
creation.
Hard disk update
unstructured content seem synonymous

with “useless” content. It costs so much to
store and protect file content, so why not use it? Is it because the content
has no sustainable value, or is it because we just don’t have the tools to
easily and effectively make use of it?
BACKUP GETS EVEN HARDER

I believe the biggest challenge in a petabyte world is backup. Consider
our new storage landscape with those hundreds of terabytes or
petabytes of file content being stored on multiple storage systems.
RAID alternatives
Now ask yourself: How do you protect all of that file content? Then think
about how much that protection will cost you, not just in dollars, but in
time and resources, too. Legacy methods or sticking with the status quo
are insufficient ways to meet the needs of today’s requirements. This
means either a new method of file protection is required or you’re just
rolling the dice when it comes to recovering data. The latter choice is a
hard one to make, especially when you consider that the consequences
of a failed recovery could permanently damage your business. This is
one of the biggest issues our data centers will confront this decade.
For the longest time we’ve been able to get by doing business as usual
and solving—or forestalling—the problem by throwing more IT infrastruc-

ture and people at it. But now we’re at an inflection point where we can
no longer be complacent with the status quo. Managing massive file
stores is one of the “big” problems in the data center for the decade, and
IT professionals need to sound the alarm and make this a real priority. 2
Tony Asaro is senior analyst and founder of Voices of IT (www.VoicesofIT.com).
9 Storage May 2010

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STORAGE
Making the Case for

STORAGE COMING IN JUNE
Protecting Quality Awards
intentions survey
Solid-State Storage SharePoint Data V: Backup and

Purchasing
Interest in solid-state More and more companies Recovery Software

storage is high right now. are deploying Microsoft For the fifth time, the
The technology’s high per- SharePoint to help ease Storage magazine/
formance, coupled with its communications and SearchStorage.com
low power consumption, enable collaboration. But Quality Awards take a look
makes it especially com- SharePoint, with its multi- at backup and recovery
pelling for demanding ple server architecture and software. As with all of
enterprise applications. other idiosyncrasies, poses the other product categories
And with a variety of solid- new problems for effective in the Quality Awards pro-
state implementations now data protection. We look at gram, we poll our readers
Hard disk update
available and newer tech- the best methods and tools to assess their overall
nologies emerging, it’s for backing up SharePoint satisfaction with the
time to take a serious look data, as well as archivers service and reliability of the
at how solid state could with interfaces built specif- backup and recovery appli-
enhance your storage ically for this collaboration cations they’re currently
environment. environment. using.
And don’t miss our monthly columns and commentary,

or the results of our Snapshot reader survey.
RAID alternatives
TechTarget Storage Media Group
STORAGE
Vice President of Editorial Site Editor TechTarget Conferences
Mark Schlack Ellen O’Brien
Director of Editorial Events
Editorial Director Senior News Director Lindsay Mullen
Rich Castagna Dave Raffo
Site Editor Editorial Events Associate
Senior Managing Editor Senior News Writer Andrew Burton Nicole Tierney
Kim Hefner Beth Pariseau

Associate Site Editor
Senior Editor Features Writer Heather Darcy
Ellen O’Brien Carol Sliwa
Assistant Site Editor Storage magazine
Creative Director Senior Managing Editor Megan Kellet 275 Grove Street
Maureen Joyce Kim Hefner Newton, MA 02466
Features Writer editor@storagemagazine.com
Editorial Assistant Associate Site Editor Todd Erickson
Subscriptions:
Francesca Sales Chris Griffin www.SearchStorage.com
Executive Editor and
Contributing Editors Independent Backup Expert
Tony Asaro W. Curtis Preston
James Damoulakis
Steve Duplessie
Site Editor
Jacob Gsoedl
Susan Troy
11 Storage May 2010

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Alternatives
to RAID
intentions survey
Purchasing
The various forms

of RAID have been
around for a long
time and have
done a good job
of protecting data.
Hard disk update
But high-capacity
drives and new
performance
demands have
spurred development
of RAID alternatives.
r
RAID alternatives
By Marc Staimer
EDUNDANT ARRAY of independent disks (RAID) has been the

standard for disk-based data protection since 1989, and is
a proven and reliable method that’s considered a basic data

storage building block. Basic storage principles tend to change
very slowly and, despite its popularity and track record, change
is coming to RAID.
To gain more insight into why an alternative to RAID might
be appealing requires some understanding about RAID and the
growing problems with the technology.
13 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
RAID SHORTCOMINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

The purpose of RAID is to protect data in the event a hard disk drive
(HDD) fails. When that failure occurs, data from that failed HDD (or mul-
tiple HDDs) is recreated from parity or copied from a mirror, depending
on the type of RAID in use. Disk drives are electro-mechanical devices
that have the highest probability of a failure and the lowest mean time
between failures (MTBF) in any storage system.
intentions survey
It takes a lot of HDDs to keep up

It takes a lot of HDDs to
Purchasing
with the rapid growth rate of data

storage that analyst firms like IDC,
Gartner and Enterprise Strategy Group
keep up with the rapid
peg at somewhere between 50% and growth rate of data
62% per year. Statistically speaking, storage that analyst
more hard disk drives mean more HDD
failures. Disk drive manufacturers have
firms like IDC, Gartner
continually increased HDD density, and and Enterprise Strategy
today we have 2 TB SATA and are likely Group peg at somewhere
going to 4 TB by the end of this year.
Hard disk update
Even high-performance SAS and Fibre between 50% and 62%

Channel (FC) drive capacities are pushing per year.
600 GB. RAID problems quickly become
evident when a rebuild is required with those increasingly dense drives.
Each RAID type (see “Traditional RAID levels,” p. 15) has tradeoffs in
write performance, read performance, level of data protection, speed
of data rebuilds and the usable storage on each hard disk drive. For ex-
ample, if guaranteeing data availability is the top priority, then some
variation of mirroring or multiple mirrors (RAID 1, 10, triple mirror, etc.)
will be required. Having full copies of the data on other HDDs or RAID
RAID alternatives
sets simplifies protection and recovery of the data but at a severe

and tangible cost because each mirror reduces usable storage by the
same amount of the original data. In addition, system resources are
required for every copy, which can impair I/O performance. Realistically,
most organizations aren’t this overprotective; most use RAID 5 and/or
RAID 6.
When a HDD fails in a RAID 5 set, the system will rebuild the data on
a spare drive that replaces the failed hard disk drive. The storage system
then exercises every sector on every HDD in the RAID set to reconstruct
the data. This heavy utilization of the other HDDs in the RAID set increases
the likelihood of another HDD failure (usually a non-recoverable read error)
by an order of magnitude, which significantly increases the likelihood
of a data failure. Ten or 20 years ago when disk capacities were much
lower, rebuilds were measured in minutes. But with disk capacities in
the terabytes, rebuilds can take hours, days or even weeks. If application
users can’t tolerate the system performance degradation that rebuilds
cause, the rebuild is given a lower priority and rebuild times increase
14 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
TRADITIONAL RAID LEVELS

Max HDD Vendor or
RAID level Description failure protection standard
RAID 0 • Data striped across hard disk drives (HDDs) for maximum write performance 0 Standard
• No actual data protection
RAID 1 • Synchronously mirrors all data from each HDD to an exact duplicate HDD 1 Standard
• No data lost if HDD faults or fails
intentions survey
• Typically highest performing RAID level at the expense of lower usable capacity
Purchasing
RAID 2 • Data protected by error correcting codes (ECCs) 1 Standard

• Parity HDD requirements proportional to the log of HDD number
• Somewhat inflexible and less efficient than RAID 5 or RAID 6 with lower
performance and reliability
• Not widely used
RAID 3 • Data is protected against the failure of any HDD in a group of N+ 1 Standard
• Similar to RAID 5 but blocks are spread across HDDs
• Parity is bitwise vs. RAID 5 block
• Parity resides on a single HDD rather than being distributed between all disks
• Random write performance is quite poor and random read performance fair at best
RAID 3 • RAID 3 with a second byte-level parity disk 2 NEC D-series
Hard disk update
Double Parity • Protects data in the event of a second HDD failure or loss of the parity HDD
• Performance is marginally slower than standard RAID 3, but system performance
can degrade noticeably if dual HDDs are rebuilding concurrently
RAID 4 • Similar to RAID 3, stripes data across many HDDs in blocks instead of RAID 3 bytes 1 Standard
to improve random access performance
• Data protection is provided by a dedicated parity HDD
• Similar to RAID 5 except uses dedicated parity instead of distributed parity
• Dedicated parity HDD remains a bottleneck, especially for random write performance.
RAID 5 • Most common RAID 1 Standard
• Provides RAID 0 performance with more economical redundancy
• Stripes block data across several HDDs while distributing parity among the HDDs
• Uses HDDs more efficiently, providing overlapped read and write operations
RAID alternatives
• Provides more usable storage than RAID 1 or 10

• Data protection comes from parity information that’s used to reconstruct data
of a failed drive
• Minimum of three and usually five HDDs per RAID group
• Rebuilds cause lower storage system performance
• Potential total RAID group data loss if second drive fails during rebuild
• Read performance tends to be lower than other RAID types because parity data
is distributed on each HDD
RAID 6 • Similar to RAID 5 but includes a second parity scheme distributed across the 2 Standard
HDDs of the RAID group
• Dual parity protects against data loss if second HDD fails
• Tends to have lower storage system performance than RAID 5 and can plummet
during dual HDD rebuilds
RAID 10 • RAID 1 striped 1 Standard
• Improves write performance
• Improves write performance closer to RAID 1
• Improves write performance closer to RAID 1
15 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
dramatically. Longer data reconstruction times typically equate to signifi-

cantly higher risks of data loss. Because of this, many storage shops are
stepping up their use of RAID 6.
RAID 6 provides a second parity or stripe that protects the data even
if two HDDs fail or have a non-recoverable read error in the RAID set.
The risk of data loss drops dramatically, but the extra stripe consumes
additional usable capacity and system performance will take a bigger
intentions survey
hit if two drives must be reconstructed simultaneously from the same

RAID group. More disturbing is the increased risk of data loss if a third
Purchasing
HDD fails or a non-recoverable read error occurs during the rebuild.

There are other RAID issues such as “bit rot” (when HDDs acquire
latent defects over time from background radiation, wear, dust, etc.) that
can cause a data reconstruction to fail. Most storage systems include
some type of background scrubbing that reads, verifies and corrects
bit rot before it becomes non-recoverable, but scrubbing takes system
resources. And higher capacities mean more time is needed to scrub.
Another RAID issue is documenting the chain of ownership for replacing
a failed HDD, which includes the documented trail (who, what, where,
Hard disk update
when) of the failed HDD from the time it was pulled to the time it was
destroyed or reconditioned. It’s a tedious,
manually intensive task that’s a bit less Even more frustrating is
stringent if the HDD is encrypted. Even
more frustrating is that the vast major-
that the vast majority of
ity of failed HDDs sent back to the failed HDDs sent back to
factory for analysis or reconditioning the factory for analysis
(somewhere between 67% and 90%) are
found to be good or no failure is found.
or reconditioning (some-
Regrettably, the discovery happens after where between 67%
RAID alternatives
the system failed the HDD, the HDD was and 90%) are found to
pulled, the data was reconstructed and
the chain of ownership documented. be good or no failure
That’s a lot of operational pain for “no is found.
failure found.”
Solid-state storage devices actually exacerbate the aforementioned
RAID problems. Because solid-state drives (SSDs) can handle high-per-
formance applications, they allow for storage systems with fewer high-
performance HDDs and more high-density, low-performance hard disk
drives. Tom Georgens, NetApp’s CEO, recently noted that “fast access
data will come to be stored in flash with the rest in SATA drives.” Lower
CapEx and OpEx for the system can end up translating into higher OpEx
because of the increase in RAID problems.
These RAID issues have inspired numerous vendors, academicians
and entrepreneurs to come up with alternatives to RAID. We categorize
those innovative alternatives into the three groups: RAID + innovation,
RAID + transformation and paradigm shift.
16 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
RAID + INNOVATION
Several vendors have addressed traditional RAID problems by taking
an incremental approach to RAID that leverages its reliability while
diminishing some of the tradeoffs (see “RAID enhancements,” p. 18).
IBM’s EVENODD (implemented by EMC on Symmetrix DMX) and NetApp’s
RAID-DP (implemented on NetApp’s FAS and V-series) have enhanced
RAID 6 by reducing algorithm overhead while increasing performance.
intentions survey
NEC Corp.’s RAID-TM or triple mirror (implemented in its D-Series

systems) aims to solve RAID 1 data loss risk if both the primary and
Purchasing
mirror drive fail or if there’s a non-recoverable read error. RAID-TM

writes data simultaneously to three separate HDDs so if two HDDs fail
or there are unrecoverable read errors in the same mirror, the app still
has access to its data with no degradation in performance even as the
drives are rebuilt. The advantage is performance; the disadvantage is
far less usable capacity.
RAID-X is an IBM XIV Storage System innovation that uses a wide
stripe to reduce RAID tradeoffs of performance and data loss risk. It’s
basically a variation of RAID 10 that uses intelligent risk algorithms to
Hard disk update
randomly distribute block mirrors throughout the entire array. This

approach allows XIV to reconstruct the
data on very large 2 TB HDDs in less Network RAID leverages
than 30 minutes. As with all mirroring the concept of RAID, but
technology, the tradeoff is reduced
usable capacity.
uses storage nodes as its
Hewlett-Packard Co.’s LeftHand lowest component level
Networks and Pivot3 Inc. provide similar instead of disk drives.
variations of Network RAID for their
x86-based clustered iSCSI storage. Network RAID leverages the concept
RAID alternatives
of RAID, but uses storage nodes as its lowest component level instead
of disk drives. This allows it to distribute a logical volume’s data blocks
across the cluster with one to four data mirrors depending on the Net-
work RAID level. Ongoing block-level, self-healing nodal health checks
allow Network RAID to copy and repair the data to another node before
a failure occurs. This decreases the probability of a hard disk drive fault
or non-recoverable read error causing a performance-sapping rebuild;
but like all mirroring technology, it reduces the amount of usable storage.
These are just some of the RAID + innovation technologies. Others
are currently incubating, including proposals for RAID 7 (triple parity

and more) or TSHOVER (triple parity).
RAID + TRANSFORMATION
There are also RAID alternatives that attempt to re-invent RAID. They
typically use RAID and are layered on top of it in some way. The concept
is to keep what’s good about RAID and fix the rest. Examples of transfor-
mation technologies include self-healing storage and BeyondRAID.
17 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
RAID ENHANCEMENTS
Max. HDD
failure protection Vendors
RAID 6 An IBM innovation that uses only two additional redundant HDDs and consists of simple 2 EMC
EVENODD exclusive-OR computations. The advantage of EVENODD is that it only requires parity hardware,
which is typically present in standard RAID 5 controllers. This reduces the number of exclusive-
OR operations over the more common Reed-Solomon computations at approximately 50%
(based on 15 drives). EVENODD has similar performance issues of RAID 6 when dual hard disk
intentions survey
drive (HDD) rebuilds are occurring. One advantage of EVENODD is that it’s based on XOR. A
Purchasing
disadvantage is that it has a few hot spots in certain diagonal blocks that cause very poor
short write performance.
RAID-DP or Stores row parity across the HDDs in a RAID 4 group; the additional parity HDD stores 2 NetApp
Row-diagonal diagonal parity across the HDD in a RDP group. The two RDP parity stripes provide data
Parity protection in the event of two HDD failures occurring within the RAID group. Performance is
nearly equal to single parity RAID 4 or RAID 5. Higher performance than standard RAID 6,
but with similar performance issues when concurrently rebuilding two HDDs.
Innovation
RAID-TM or RAID-TM provides the high speed of RAID 1 while providing the high reliability and double HDD 2 NEC
RAID +
RAID Triple fault protection of RAID 6. RAID-TM writes data simultaneously to three separate HDDs. Even
Mirror with two HDD faults or unrecoverable read errors in the same mirror, the application still has
access to its data with no degradation in performance even while drives are rebuilt.
RAID-X RAID-X doesn’t require a spare HDD, just spare capacity on existing HDDs in the storage 2 plus, depending IBM (XIV)
Hard disk update
system. The objects can be mirrored between any two types of HDDs (no need to match drive on number
size or speed). Rebuild performance is extremely fast because data is mirrored. This is a of mirrors
variation of RAID 1 or RAID 10, but with the added protection of random distribution. A second
drive failure can result in data loss that can only be mitigated with additional mirrorings. Usable
storage can be restricted depending on the number of mirrors (minimally half).
Network RAID Lays out a logical volume’s blocks across the cluster, providing reliability configurable on a 4 GridStor,
per-volume basis to best meet the needs of each application’s data. Depending on a logical Hewlett-Packard
volume’s Network RAID level, one to four copies of each block are striped across the cluster. LeftHand, Pivot3
A volume’s RAID level can be changed (auto-restriping) without data availability interruption.
Also provides proactive block-level self-healing to decrease probability of a non-recoverable
read error. However, each block copy reduces the amount of usable storage.
Self-healing Also know as heal-in-place storage. Uses series of automated repair sequences designed to 2 Atrato, DataDirect
RAID alternatives
storage eliminate or mitigate the majority of HDD failures and unnecessary RAID data rebuilds. Isolates Networks, Panasas,
HDD sectors it can’t fix and only rebuilds the data lost on those sectors. More expensive upfront LSI, NEC, 3PAR and
than traditional RAID, but with a much lower total cost of ownership. Heal-in-place storage Xiotech
requires a pool of unused HDDs for the fail-in-place capability.
Transformation
BeyondRAID BeyondRAID is essentially a virtualization engine on top of RAID that chooses the correct
RAID +
2 Data Robotics
RAID algorithm based on the data protection required. It writes blocks that can actually alter-
nate between data protection methodologies. If more storage capacity is required, additional
HDDs can be inserted or small HDDs can be replaced with larger ones. Simple administration
allows switching from single to dual disk redundancy with a single click. Protects against dual
drive failures and adds transparent automatic data healing. It’s data aware, allows for mixed
drive sizes, drive reordering, proportional rebuild time and self-management. Only available for
small systems of up to eight drives.
Erasure Codes Also known as a form of forward error correction (FEC), erasure coding adds additional infor- Depends on amount Cleversafe,
mation to a stored object that allows any dataset to be completely resurrected from a subset of additional object EMC, NEC
Alternatives to RAID
of the total information. Multiple slices (storage objects) or subsets of a dataset are distributed information
Paradigm Shift
across multiple storage or server nodes. More additional information attached to a stored object
equals greater resiliency of the dataset, protecting against larger numbers of components (disk
drives, storage objects or server nodes) that can be lost and still recover the complete dataset.
The additional information on each storage object also reduces the amount of usable storage.
The biggest issue with erasure code based-storage is reduced write performance, especially
small writes.
18 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
Self-healing storage: Xiotech Corp.’s Intelligent Storage Elements

(ISE) is a good example of self-healing storage. ISE tightly integrates
RAID and HDDs, and combines them into a single storage element.
Xiotech engineered ISE to resolve most RAID rebuild issues by elimi-
nating 67% to 90% of the rebuilds. It starts by reducing HDD faults by
proactively healing hard disk drives
before a fault occurs using similar HDD Xiotech engineered ISE
to resolve most RAID
intentions survey
reconditioning algorithms employed by

the factory. It also uses advanced vibra-
Purchasing
tion controls and sealed systems called

rebuild issues by
DataPacs to reduce outside influences eliminating 67% to
from causing HDD faults. When a fault 90% of the rebuilds.
does occur, it reacts by providing reme-
dial component repair within the sealed DataPac using methods similar
to what the original manufacturer uses. It analyzes power cycles, recali-
brates components, remanufactures the HDD, and migrates data when
required to other sectors or HDDs. If the fault persists, ISE will isolate
just the non-recoverable sectors and then initiate data reconstruction
Hard disk update
only for the faulted HDD sectors. So there are far fewer rebuilds and,
when one is required, there’s much less to reconstruct. In addition, it’s all
automated so no manual intervention to pull failed drives is required. The
result is equivalent to a factory-remanufactured HDD with only the com-
ponents that are beyond repair taken out of service. The downside to this
transformational technology is that it has higher up-front costs, although
it lowers the total cost of ownership (Xiotech provides a five-year warranty).
Atrato Inc.’s Velocity1000 (V1000) uses a self-healing technology called
Fault Detection, Isolation Recovery (FDIR) in combination with Atrato’s
Virtualization Engine (AVE). FDIR watches component and system health,
RAID alternatives
and adds self-diagnostics and autonomic self-healing, but it doesn’t

attempt to remanufacture or recondition HDDs in place as Xiotech does.
Atrato puts 160 2.5-inch SATA drives in a 3U system called SAID (self-
maintaining array of independent disks). Atrato uses its extensive SATA
drive performance database of operational reliability testing (ORT) to
monitor the installed drives actual performance to detect SATA HDD
deviations. Atrato also deals with HDD faults by first attempting to repair
the faulting HDD sectors (although not with manufacturer-level recondi-
tioning, remanufacturing or component recalibration). If the fault or non-
recoverable read error can’t be repaired, the sector is isolated and only
the affected data is reconstructed and remapped to virtual spare capacity.
If a disk drive completely fails, it’s reconstructed and remapped to the
virtual spare capacity. Atrato reduces the number of rebuilds and rebuild
times by reconstructing only affected data on virtual drives. Atrato backs
its technology with a three-year warranty.
DataDirect Networks Inc.’s DDN S2A technology heal-in-place approach
to disk failure attempts several levels of HDD recovery before a hard disk
19 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
drive is removed from service. It begins keeping a journal of all writes

to each HDD showing behavior aberrations and then attempts recovery
operations. When recovery operations succeed, only a small portion of the
HDD requires rebuilding using the journaled information so rebuild times
are reduced and a service call may be avoided.
Panasas Inc.’s ActiveScan technology continuously monitors HDDs
and their contents to detect problems. ActiveScan monitors data objects,
intentions survey
RAID parity, disk media and the disk drive attributes. When a potential
problem is detected, data is moved to spare blocks on the same disk.
Purchasing
Future HDD failure is predicted through the use of HDD self-monitoring

analysis and reporting technology (SMART) attribute statistical analysis,
permitting action to be taken to protect data before a failure occurs.
When an HDD failure is predicted, user-set policies facilitate preemp-
tively migrating the data to other HDDs, which eliminates or mitigates
the need for reconstruction.
LSI Corp. and NEC both detect HDD If an alternative sector
sector errors while allowing operations can be assigned, the HDD
to continue with the other drives in the
Hard disk update
RAID group. If an alternative sector can

is allowed to return to
be assigned, the HDD is allowed to return operation, avoiding a
to operation, avoiding a complete rebuild. complete rebuild.
Performance is maintained throughout
the detection and repair process. This is a limited self-healing technology
that reduces the number of rebuilds and helps maintain performance.
3PAR’s InSpire Architecture is engineered to sustain high perform-
ance levels by leveraging advanced HDD error isolation to reduce the
amount of data that requires reconstruction, and by taking advantage
of its massive parallelism to provide rapid rebuilds (typically fewer than
RAID alternatives
30 minutes). The system uses “chunklets” in their many-to-many drive

relationships. That same massive parallelism allows 3PAR to isolate
RAID sets across multiple drive chassis to minimize the risk of data
loss if a chassis is lost.
BeyondRAID: Data Robotics Inc.’s BeyondRAID sits on top of RAID and
makes it completely transparent to the administrator. It transforms RAID
from a deterministic offline process into an online dynamic one. Essentially
self-managing, BeyondRAID chooses RAID sets based on the required
data protection at any given point in time. But it’s how BeyondRAID
addresses RAID issues that truly makes it stand out. It protects against
one or two HDD failures and has built-in automatic data self-healing (not
storage self-healing). Data blocks are spread across all of the drives so
data reconstruction is very fast. Because the system is “data aware,” it
allows for different drive sizes, drive re-ordering and proportional rebuild
times. Because it tops out at 8 SATA drives, it’s most appealing for small-
and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), but it’s a true turn it on, hook it up
and forget it storage system.
20 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
RAID PARADIGM SHIFT: ERASURE CODES

Erasure codes are designed to separate data into unrecognizable
chunks of information with additional information added to each chunk
that allows any complete data set to be resurrected from some subset
of the chunks. The chunks can be distributed to different storage locations
within a data center, city, region or anywhere in the world.
Erasure codes have built-in data security because each individual
intentions survey
chunk doesn’t contain enough information to reveal the original data set.
A large enough subset of chunks from the different storage nodes is
Purchasing
needed to fully retrieve the total data set, with the number of required
chunks determined by the amount of additional information assigned
to each chunk. More additional information means fewer chunks are
required to retrieve the whole data set.
Erasure codes are resilient against Erasure codes are
natural disasters or technological resilient against natural
failures because only a subset of the
chunks is needed to reconstitute the
disasters or technological
original data. In actuality, with erasure failures because only a
Hard disk update
codes there can be multiple simultaneous subset of the chunks is

failures across a string of hosting devices,
servers, storage elements, HDDs or needed to reconstitute
networks, and the data will still be the original data.
accessible in real time.
Also known as forward error correction (FEC), erasure coding storage
is a completely different approach than RAID. Erasure codes eliminate
all of the RAID issues described here. It’s a new approach and at this
time only three vendors have erasure code-based products: Cleversafe
Inc.’s dsNet, EMC Corp.’s Atmos and NEC’s HYDRAstor.
RAID alternatives
Erasure codes appear to be better suited for large data sets than
smaller ones. It’s especially appropriate for cloud or distributed storage
because it never has to replicate a data set and can distribute the data
over multiple geographic locations.
RAID’S EVOLUTION
The issues with traditional RAID are well known, and are escalating
with higher disk capacities. The RAID alternatives described here
address many of those problems, and more new approaches are on
the way. Selecting the best fit for a particular environment requires
research, testing, pilot programs, patience and a willingness to take
a risk with a non-traditional approach. 2
Marc Staimer is founder and senior analyst at Dragon Slayer Consulting in

Beaverton, Ore., a consulting practice that focuses on strategic planning,
product development and market development for technology products.
You can contact him at marcstaimer@mac.com.
21 Storage May 2010

intentions survey
HARD DISK DRIVE

Purchasing
TECHNOLOGY
trends
Hard disk update
Although solid state is emerging as a viable enterprise

storage alternative, there’s still plenty of life left in
n
hard disk drive technology, with higher capacity,
greener and more capable drives on the way.
RAID alternatives
By Alan Radding
OBODY IS SERIOUSLY suggesting the era of hard disk drive (HDD) technology is
about to end. To the contrary, HDD vendors continue advancing the technology.
Still, a few doubts arise as solid-state drives (SSDs) and other solid-state
technologies take on selective enterprise storage chores. “The amount of SSD
replacing hard disk drives at present is miniscule,” said Mark Geenen, chairman,
International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA). Yet,
IDEMA began accepting SSD vendors into its ranks in 2009.

More telling, maybe, are the enterprise storage managers willing to experiment
with solid-state storage alongside HDD. “We’re testing a couple of Fusion-io
cards in some servers for a couple of high-performance trading applications,”
said Kevin Fiore, CIO at San Francisco-based investment firm Thomas Weisel
Partners LLC. The company wants to determine if the 160 GB and 320 GB solid-
state cards make enough of a difference to justify the extra thousands of dollars
they cost.
22 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
Solid-state storage, however, will remain a small piece of the enter-

prise storage picture for some time (see “Is solid-state storage in your
future?” this page). Instead, what’s driving enterprise storage is the
continuation of HDD trends that have been underway for six years or
more. The trends include the steadily falling cost per gigabyte of HDDs,
the shift from 3.5-inch to
intentions survey
2.5-inch form factors, and a

movement away from 15K
Purchasing
rpm Fibre Channel (FC) to 10K

IS SOLID-STATE STORAGE
and 7,200 rpm SAS and SATA IN YOUR FUTURE?
drives. And don’t forget ever-
increasing disk densities re- The cost of solid-state
flected in the emergence of storage fell dramatically
1 TB and 2 TB drives, with 3 in 2009. Prices will dip at
TB and 4 TB capacities on the a slower pace in 2010 but
horizon. pick up again after that,
Steadily evolving HDD according to Jim Handy,
Hard disk update
technology will also force solid-state drive (SSD)

storage managers to revisit analyst at Objective Analysis in Los Gatos,
issues like encryption, com- Calif. Although solid-state storage comes in
pression and data deduplica- a variety of forms, NAND flash has emerged
tion. IT managers can now as the leading choice for enterprise storage.
decide the best place to do Until recently, solid state was too expen-
encryption or deduplication: sive for anything but situations demanding the
on the server, the array, an highest high performance. In 2009, SSD cost,
appliance or the disk drive. on average, 20 times more than Fibre Channel
With the newest generation hard disk drives (FC HDDs) on a cost/GB basis,
RAID alternatives
of HDDs, all options are on Handy noted. But if you compared them based
the table. on cost/IOPS, SSD blows away HDD.
Similarly, new HDD tech- To Mark Teter, chief technology officer at
nology offers more energy- Advanced Systems Group, SSD’s low cost/IOPS
saving options, primarily via spells doom for FC HDDs. He advises companies
disk spin-down technologies. requiring high-performing storage to replace
But the massive amounts their large numbers of FC spindles with a much
of capacity on a single drive smaller amount of SSD.
also raise questions about Already storage vendors and drive makers
the efficacy of RAID 5 as a alike are embracing the HDD/SSD combination.

data protection technique EMC Corp., for example, has incorporated SSD
(see “The end of RAID,” p. 24). as what amounts to tier 0 in its enterprise
storage hierarchy and recommends its FAST
PRICE/CAPACITY CURVE product to automatically move data between
The data storage industry SSD and HDD tiers. Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM,
has enjoyed a long ride up Oracle-Sun and many other storage vendors
the price/capacity curve. all offer SSD storage options.
23 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
THE END OF RAID

Each year vendors pack
more data onto disks with For industry analyst Mike
a corresponding drop in the Karp, the growing capacity
cost per gigabyte. It’s the of multiple terabyte disk
storage industry’s version drives inevitably increases
of Moore’s Law. disk errors. “For every unit
intentions survey
In recent years, 40% of capacity we know there

will be a certain number
Purchasing
annual price/capacity im-

provements have been typi- of errors,” he said.
cal, but that pleasant pace Organizations traditionally relied on RAID 5
may be slowing. “It will be to overcome those errors through the use of
increasingly difficult to get parity data. However, because of the time it
these kinds of gains,” said takes a system to rebuild a 1 TB drive using
Mark Nossokoff, a senior RAID 5 the likelihood that another drive may
member of the strategic fail increases, compounding the problems.
planning team at LSI Corp.’s Karp’s solution is object-based RAID, which
Engenio Storage Group. The relies on small units of storage and allows the
Hard disk update
latest gains resulted from system to rebuild the drive in smaller incre-
the vertical stacking of bits ments. Others suggest RAID variations that
on the disk to overcome the use multiple parity disks, such as RAID 6, can
limits of the superparamag- do the job. (See “Alternatives to RAID,” p. 13.)
netic effect. Future increases
will need a new technology
advance. Bit-patterned
media (BPM), heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and microwave-
assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) are the leading contenders to replace
perpendicular technology (see “New technologies pack more data on
RAID alternatives
disks,” p. 25).
How much capacity can be squeezed onto a 3.5-inch platter using
current technologies? “I expect 8 TB within four to five years,” predicts
Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst at StorageIO Group in Stillwater,
Minn. With new materials and different technologies, Schulz won’t be
surprised to see HDD capacity continue to increase dramatically. Jon
Toigo, CEO and managing principal at Toigo Partners International, reports
a Toshiba breakthrough that stores 4 TB per square inch (not per 3.5-inch
platter). Toigo predicts a 4 TB/sq. in. disk drive within 36 months. Similar
advances and new materials promise equally dramatic increases in tape

capacities.
A general cost per gigabyte of HDD storage is difficult to pin down due
to the wide variety of HDDs with different capacities and speeds, and the
different ways HDDs are packaged and sold. Still, there are ballpark ap-
proximations. For example, a high-performance FC drive in an array would
run approximately $80/GB; stick it in a SAN and the cost bumps up to
$180/GB, according to Toigo. Figure approximately $60/GB for a SAS drive in
24 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
an array and $160/GB in a SAN; SATA drives are about $40/GB.

Prices are rock-bottom for consumer-quality hard disk drives with
some retailers selling 1 TB 5,400 rpm drives with a USB connection for $89
or less—about 9 cents per gigabyte! These may not be industrial-strength
drives, but at that price a manager could buy a handful and back up an en-
tire workgroup or department several times over in case one failed. Enter-
prise tape is a bargain too, Toigo added, with prices at about 44 cents/GB.
intentions survey
Given the low cost/GB, especially for drives with capacities of 1 TB or

Purchasing
more, some storage man-

agers are snapping up the
largest drives they can buy.
“We’re always buying more
NEW TECHNOLOGIES PACK
hard drives. We buy SATA MORE DATA ON DISKS
for the low end, SCSI for the
midtier and we even have Several technologies are vying to produce the
a tiny amount of SSD,” said next breakthrough in packing more bits on a
Ben Higginbotham, director piece of storage media. Currently, perpendicu-
Hard disk update
of new technology at Where- lar magnetic recording (PMR), which stacks

ToLive.com, a Web develop- bits vertically on the surface rather than laid
ment firm and SaaS provider out horizontally, is the technology of choice,
for the real estate industry. but it will hit the superparamagnetic limit
Most recently the company within a few years. But alternative technolo-
has been buying 1 TB SATA gies are emerging, including:
drives in its ongoing quest • Bit-patterned media (BPM) stores each
for more storage capacity. bit as a nanometer-scale pattern of grains on
Next up for the company the media. As described by Hitachi, it creates
as it continues to ride the an ordered array of highly uniform islands,
RAID alternatives
price/capacity curve are each island capable of storing an individual

2 TB drives. bit.
Thomas Weisel’s Fiore • Heat-assisted magnetic recording
is also constantly seeking (HAMR) uses heat to stabilize the tiny stored
greater capacity with both bits, allowing smaller bits to be recorded.
3.5-inch and 2.5-inch HDDs. HAMR, however, creates heat, which runs
“We want to get the most counter to the industry’s growing green
capacity in the smallest storage impulses.
footprint. It’s a real estate • Microwave-assisted magnetic record-
issue with us” he said. Going ing (MAMR) writes bits at different layers of
from 1 TB to 2 TB doubles the the media.
amount of capacity for each
drive shelf. Similarly, with 2.5- HAMR will likely be ready for production by
inch HDDs he can pack more 2013, with MAMR probably ready a year later,
drives into the same space. according to Mark Nossokoff, a senior member
But not every storage of the strategic planning team at LSI Corp.’s
manager is enamored with Engenio Storage Group.
25 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
the biggest drives. “The cost per gigabyte is appealing, but the 1 TB and
2 TB drives also scare me because of the increased risk of failure,” said
Darrell Stymiest, director of IT operations at UGL Unicco, a facilities
services company based in Newton, Mass. Instead, Stymiest prefers
to buy smaller drives, currently 300 GB or 500 GB capacities.
FORM-FACTOR AND INTERFACE CHANGES

intentions survey
The greatest capacities are still in the 3.5-inch HDD form-factor, although
Purchasing
there’s a gradual transition in enterprise storage to the 2.5-inch HDD,

which currently tops out at approximately
600 GB. “The 3.5-inch disk is still a major “The 3.5-inch disk is
part of the market,” said Teresa Worth,
senior marketing product manager at
still a major part of the
Seagate. “By 2012, 2.5-inch disk will market. By 2012, 2.5-inch
pull even; from then on, 2.5 inch will disk will pull even; from
take over.” IDEMA’s Geenen concurred:
“Enterprise storage today is still 3.5-inch then on, 2.5 inch will take
Hard disk update
disk, but that’s changing to 2.5 inch.” over.”

The appeal of the 2.5-inch hard drive —Teresa Worth, senior marketing product manager, Seagate
technology is energy efficiency. “The
2.5-inch drive offers a 60% improvement in power,” Worth said. With
vendors like Seagate adding intelligence to the devices that allows
storage managers to selectively reduce disk spinning, hard disk drive
power consumption can be reduced even more.
Lincoln, Neb.-based trade magazine publisher Sandhills Publishing
Co. standardized on 2.5-inch HDDs a year ago. “We do a lot with SQL
Server and for that we want a lot of fast-spinning spindles,” said Kim
RAID alternatives
Mehring, IT manager. The 2.5-inch form factor enables Sandhills to pack

more disks in each array, which means more spindles. By aggregating
more spindles, Mehring can boost I/O performance. He considered SSD
for its performance, but the cost was still too high for his budget.
Along with the form-factor transition, the industry is witnessing an
interface transition from FC for tier 1 enterprise storage to SAS, and to
SATA for tier 2 and archival storage. “With 2.5-inch drives we’re seeing
a shift to SAS for performance and SATA for high capacity,” StorageIO
Group’s Schulz noted.
But FC drives are far from dead. EMC Corp., for example, recently
increased its standard 15K FC drive from 300 GB to 600 GB, according
to Scott Delandy, senior product manager for infrastructure products
at EMC. Where high-performance storage is required, however, EMC now
recommends a combination of SSD and SAS or SATA. “You can replace
146 GB 15K drives with flash and get 30 times greater IOPS for the money,”
he said. That kind of disk strategy requires automated storage tiering.
If the flash tests work out well at Thomas Weisel Partners, Fiore can
26 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
imagine shifting away from FC over time to a combination of flash and

SATA. “With FC, the largest capacity we can get is 400 GB. We’re at the
mercy of the array vendor,” he said. Given his concerns about storage
footprint, Fiore has been steadily buying more SATA than FC disk.
ENCRYPTION AND GOING GREEN

Chores previously handled by servers or appliances, such as encryption
intentions survey
and data deduplication, can now be performed directly on hard disk

Purchasing
drives. Specifically, vendors are introducing HDDs with built-in encryption.

“Encryption really belongs at the drive level,” said Seagate’s Worth. The
company already offers a self-encrypting drive and expects it to become
the standard choice as part of the normal enterprise HDD upgrade process.
Storage managers, however, may not be in any hurry to buy built-in
HDD encryption. “We don’t worry about encryption, and we do our de-
duplication on our Compellent SAN,”
WhereToLive.com’s Higginbotham said. “We encrypt laptops that
IDEMA’s Geenen sees encryption leave our premises or
Hard disk update
as a way for HDD vendors to add

something they might charge more for. specific data. We see no
“We encrypt laptops that leave our need to encrypt entire
premises or specific data,” Thomas drives on the SAN.”
Weisel’s Fiore said. “We see no need —Kevin Fiore, CIO, Thomas Weisel Partners LLC
to encrypt entire drives on the SAN.”
Green storage takes several forms with HDD. First, larger capacities
mean companies can get the same amount of storage while spinning
fewer drives, which saves energy. Second, “vendors are building intelli-
gent power management into the drives that allows them to drop the
RAID alternatives
rpm speed or turn off writes,” StorageIO Group’s Schulz said.

Storage managers are interested in green disk drive technologies,
but they’re not exactly jumping at the products. “We don’t spin down
disks, but anything that saves power, like using large, slower drives,
we do,” WhereToLive.com’s Higginbotham said.
Hard disk drive technology is undergoing significant shifts in form
factor, capacity, interfaces and capabilities. It’s not, however, going
away—certainly not in the next decade or maybe ever. Solid-state storage
will get cheaper and work its way in increasingly greater volume into the
enterprise storage strategy, but more likely as a complement rather than

a replacement for hard drives. 2
Alan Radding is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to Storage

magazine and SearchStorage.com.
27 Storage May 2010

intentions survey
Purchasing
Hard disk update
STORAGE MANAGERS
RAID alternatives
CAN REACH FOR THEIR

WALLETS
The purchasing
picture for storage
managers is a
By Rich Castagna
again
good news/bad news STORAGE MANAGERS may be able to loosen their belts
story: budgets are a notch in 2010, but the era of storage budget belt-
no longer in the tightening is hardly over. Storage budgets, as reported
by the 697 respondents to the Storage magazine/
negative column, SearchStorage.com bi-annual Storage Purchasing
but they’re not rising Intentions survey, didn’t budge into positive territory,
much either. but avoided the negative to stay flat compared with 2009.
28 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
Given the recent context, that’s vaguely encouraging news as we saw

year-over-year budgets go negative last year on both the spring (-1.9%)
and fall (-0.4%) editions of the survey.
Smaller companies appear to be bearing the brunt of the still uneasy
economy more than their big brethren. At companies with revenue less
than $100 million, budgets are down 0.8% compared with last year. For
medium-sized and large companies, the picture is considerably brighter;
intentions survey
storage budgets should rise 1.3% at medium-sized firms and 1.9% at

Purchasing
companies with revenue in excess of $1 billion.

With regard to sheer dollar amounts,
the average storage budget clocked in With regard to sheer
at $2.8 million, just a hair shy of the dollar amounts, the
$2.9 million recorded on both of our
2009 surveys. And as in previous years, average storage budget
that relatively high average was skewed clocked in at $2.8 million,
by some pretty hefty budgets at the top
just a hair shy of the
end; of all reporting companies, 57% of
$2.9 million recorded
Hard disk update
respondents noted that their storage

budgets were less than $1 million for on both 2009 surveys.
2010.
Whether reduced or slightly increased, storage budgets will be allocated
much as they have been in previous years, with the biggest chunk—39%—
earmarked for disk hardware.
NO RECESSION FOR DISK CAPACITY

Seeing budgets remain at the level of an extraordinarily recessionary
year or rising a point or so may be small solace to storage managers
RAID alternatives
who once again are faced with the need to add more disk capacity. On
average, companies expect to add 40 TB of new disk capacity, up from
34 TB last fall. Over the past couple of years we’ve seen the estimates
for additional disk capacity drop a bit in the fall, so the actual average
additions may be lower by year’s end.
New disk capacity will be added to an already installed average of
61 TB, so if the anticipated growth follows through, that growth rate
would be approaching 66%. Not surprisingly, larger companies plan to
add more capacity (84 TB) than smaller outfits, but with 35 TB and 25 TB,
respectively, medium-sized and small companies are gearing up for
some hefty upgrades, too.

Continuing a trend that emerged over the last three years, more
than a third of the money data storage managers plan to spend on disk
hardware will go to buying disks to beef up the capacity of existing
arrays rather than purchasing entirely new frames. This suggests that
those managers anticipated the kind of capacity growth we’ve seen
and “bought big” a few years back and are still topping off those larger
systems.
29 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION TO THE RESCUE

The need for more and more disk capacity is nothing new, but it looks like
storage managers are taking (or considering) some newer approaches
to cope with burgeoning data stores. In this survey, for example, we
see a renewed interest in storage virtualization, an effective method
of squeezing efficiency out of installed arrays. Although it’s hard to call
storage virtualization “new,” companies have been fairly cautious over
intentions survey
the years in adopting it.

Purchasing
Thirty-five percent of this survey’s respondents have virtualized some

or all their storage, a jump of 4 points compared with last fall and a sizable
spread of 8 points over last spring. The number of companies evaluating
storage virtualization technology is up as well, at 24% vs. 21% in the
spring of 2009. Perhaps even more telling, only 41% said they haven’t
virtualized any storage compared with 53% a year ago.
And those who have taken the storage virtualization plunge are doing
more of it. Last spring (2009), 53% said they had virtualized some of
their block storage; this year, 69% have done so. The file storage virtual-
Hard disk update
ization results are nearly as dramatic:

71% have virtualized some of their file Last fall, 30% of those
systems vs. the 58% reported one year
ago. It should be pointed out, however,
surveyed indicated they
that the number of companies that would purchase virtual-
have virtualized all of their block (20%) ization hardware or soft-
or file (14%) storage hasn’t truly
increased much over the past year. ware; this year, 42% are
Plans to add storage virtualization in the market for storage
technologies are also up. Last fall, 30% virtualization gear.
RAID alternatives
of those surveyed indicated they would

purchase virtualization hardware or software; this year, 42% are in the
market for storage virtualization gear. Among the many virtualization al-
ternatives, most interest is focused on virtualization appliances (16% plan
to purchase) and virtualization software that runs in an array (also 16%).
With “NAS sprawl” now a familiar phrase in our storage lexicon, interest
in file virtualization seems to be gaining; 36% will give it a look and some
consideration this year.
SEEKING STORAGE EFFICIENCY

Of course, storage virtualization isn’t the only route to more efficient

use of installed and new storage capacity. Getting a bigger bang for the
buck, especially for sub-tier-1 storage, is another tack especially when
storage density is a greater requisite than performance. iSCSI systems
neatly fill that bill and often still boast enough performance to host a
company’s key applications.
Forty percent of respondents currently use iSCSI storage, and 41%
(there is some overlap) already have or plan to deploy iSCSI storage in
30 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
their shops. Price is obviously one of the most attractive features of

iSCSI storage, but for 47% of the companies represented in the survey,
these systems can still burn enough rubber to serve up data for their
mission-critical applications.
Cheaper storage is all well and good, but it still has to be used effi-
ciently to minimize capacity waste. In the past year, primary storage
data reduction has become, arguably, the hottest topic in storage.
intentions survey
Users have been impressed with the results they’ve seen with data
Purchasing
deduplication in their backup operations and its relatively easy imple-

mentation, and they’re eager to see similar results for their online or
nearline storage.
Given that primary storage data Given that primary
reduction is still a relatively new concept storage data reduction
and the field of players offering prod-
ucts is still rather small, a surprising
is still a relatively new
30% of respondents have either imple- concept and the field of
mented it or plan to this year. Add to players offering products
Hard disk update
that the 33% who are currently evaluating

primary storage data reduction tech- is still rather small,
nologies and products, and it’s clear a surprising 30% of
that more storage vendors will take respondents have either
note and roll out new products over the
coming months. An interesting parallel already implemented
can be drawn to thin provisioning, which it or plan to this year.
was met with some resistance by storage
system vendors who feared they might cannibalize their own disk sales.
Ultimately, user demand won out and thin provisioning is now a check-
RAID alternatives
list item on most system vendors’ spec sheets.

Saving on operational costs is also an imperative in these days of
pared-down budgets. Power conservation in storage systems has, tradi-
tionally, been met with mostly yawns from storage managers, who rated
it little better than “nice to have” rather than “need it.” Saving a few
bucks on electricity is still hardly a top priority, but 5% note that con-
servation is their most important criteria when considering an array
purchase decision—a modest number but the highest we’ve seen to date.
THE STATE OF SOLID STATE

Solid-state storage has captured the imagination of most storage man-

agers, and a hefty chunk of the storage budgets for those shops that
have implemented this diskless storage medium. There’s an awful lot to
like about solid state—it’s lightning fast, runs cool and sips juice—but
it’s still significantly more expensive than traditional hard disk drives.
In the fall of 2009, when we first asked about solid state use, we
found that just under 8% of respondents were using solid-state storage
in some form. In our most recent survey, that slice has increased to
31 Storage May 2010

Massive file storage RAID alternatives Hard disk update Purchasing Data storage spending
intentions survey
32
by the numbers
Storage May 2010

STORAGE
STORAGE
by the numbers
intentions survey
Purchasing
Hard disk update
RAID alternatives
survey
ABOUT THE SURVEY

The Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com
Purchasing Intentions survey is fielded twice
a year; this is the eighth year the survey has
been conducted. Storage magazine subscribers
and SearchStorage.com members are invited
to participate in the survey, which gathers

information related to storage managers’ pur-
chasing plans for a variety of storage product
categories. This edition had 697 qualified
respondents across a broad spectrum of
industries, with the average company size
measured as having revenue of $1.4 billion.
33 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
more than 10%, with another 6% planning to deploy it this year. Thirty-
five percent expressed plans to evaluate solid-state storage in 2010.
Among shops currently running solid-state storage, the average
installation was 6.9 TB, which is a substantial amount of solid state.
Despite the high average, typical installations appear to be smaller,
with 38% of those surveyed reporting less than 1 TB currently installed.
While still substantially higher than
intentions survey
hard disks prices, the cost of solid state While still substantially
Purchasing
is dropping sharply and users seem to

be increasing their purchases. For users
higher than hard disk
who indicated that they would be pur- prices, the cost of solid
chasing (or have already purchased) state is dropping sharply
solid-state storage in 2010, the average
amount they said they’ll buy is 6.1 TB.
and users seem to be
If you factor in those respondents who increasing their purchases.
said they weren’t in the market for any
solid-state storage this year, that average drops to 2.8 TB, which is still
Hard disk update
a hefty chunk of solid state.

The most popular place to put solid-state storage is in traditional
storage arrays, hardly surprising, as just about every array vendor out
there now offers a solid-state drive (SSD) option. Sixty-nine percent of
solid-state users have implemented the technology in their arrays; 33%
are using it as direct-attached storage (DAS) in servers.
Though solid-state storage has obvious appeal, its price still bars
entry for many companies (61% said it’s too expensive). For 43% of
survey respondents, there’s no need for solid state as they’re quite
satisfied with the performance of their hard disk systems.
RAID alternatives
CLOUD STORAGE ISN’T JUST AN ILLUSION

In a close race with solid state for buzzword of the year, cloud storage
is taking shape as a viable alternative to building out in-house storage
environments. The current survey marked the first time we asked ques-
tions specifically about using cloud storage services for things other
than backup, and we were surprised at the results, especially consider-
ing all of the concerns we’ve been hearing from storage managers
about putting their companies’ data out there in the cloud.
Fourteen percent of respondents report using cloud storage now,
with the most activity occurring around cloud storage for disaster
recovery (6%). But 4% are using it to hold primary data from their data
centers, and an equal number are using it for nearline data storage.
While those statistics aren’t staggering at this point, plans for cloud
storage services in 2010 tell a different story—one that’s bound to warm
the hearts of service providers.
We asked respondents which types of data they will start using cloud
storage services to store in 2010, and perhaps the most significant finding
34 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
is that only 43% rule out using these services this year. Among the
others, 17% will use it for disaster recovery and an eye-opening 9% will
look to the cloud to store primary data. Six percent will use it for remote
office data, and another 5% expect to tuck some nearline data into the
cloud.
BACKUP TECHNOLOGIES STILL TOP OF MIND

intentions survey
Once again, survey respondents plan to reduce their dependence on

Purchasing
tape as a backup medium. Thirty-one percent plan to decrease their use

of tape for backup in 2010, which is the highest number we’ve seen in
years (it was 29% in the spring of 2009). Over the years, however, we’ve
seen higher decrease-tape-usage numbers in the spring surveys tem-
pered by more moderate, and probably realistic, numbers in the fall
editions of the surveys.
That said, it’s the bigger and smaller companies where we see the
largest segments planning a reduced role for tape. Among large companies,
36% will decrease tape use in 2010, the highest we’ve seen to date. For
Hard disk update
small companies, the figure is 34%, a 6-point jump from last fall and
also the highest recorded in years.
Still, some respondents (26%) report
Forty percent of
that they’ll actually increase their use
of tape. But among those who plan to respondents hope to
buy new tape libraries, the size of the increase their spending
libraries they’ve already purchased or
are likely to purchase continues to shrink.
on dedupe technologies
Overall, the average number of slots in in 2010.
planned new library purchases dropped
to 97, compared to 101 last year and 130 in the spring of 2008. (Higher
RAID alternatives
tape drive densities also play a big part in reducing the number of slots
required in a library.)
The move away from tape has been a long, drawn-out process and,
if the technology is truly dying, it has taken a page out of Generalissimo
Francisco Franco’s book in delaying its demise. We expect the slow
downward spiral will level out soon, as tape still plays an important role
in many companies of all sizes: 79% still spin off some or all of their
backup data to tape.
But the biggest backup story continues to be data deduplication.
Forty percent of respondents hope to increase their spending on dedupe

technologies in 2010. That supports the 23% who are currently using
dedupe in their backup operations and the 32% who plan to add it this
year.
Generally, it looks like data deduplication for backup is maturing. It’s
not necessarily showing the impressive jumps in implementations and
spending plans as it did a couple of years ago, but rather rising steadily
with fairly consistent budget allocations.
35 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
While the cloud is just getting its grip on primary data storage, it’s
becoming well entrenched for backup and quickly gaining the confidence
and budget dollars of our respondents. Last year, between 19% and 21%
were using cloud backup services for one or more applications or storage
types. In the latest survey, that number jumped to 34%, a notable
increase that could signal the accept-
ance of cloud backup among companies While the cloud is
intentions survey
of all sizes. Thirty-eight percent of

small businesses are using at least
just getting its grip on
Purchasing
one of these services and 35% of big primary data storage,

businesses are using them—a sign that it’s becoming well
a fair number of enterprises now have
faith in cloud storage. entrenched for backup
Using cloud backup services for and quickly gaining the
email and database application data confidence and budget
ranked at the top, with both used by 18%
of respondents; backing up user files or dollars of our respondents.
desktop/notebook files are each used by
Hard disk update
14% of those surveyed, while 13% use these services to back up remote
sites or branch offices.
LOOKING AHEAD
Each year our survey wraps up with a question that asks about intentions
related to new or newer storage technologies that may not yet have
market penetration. On this “What’s hot/What’s not” list, data dedupli-
cation holds the top spot, as it has for the last four surveys, with 76%
of respondents already implementing it, planning to or actively evaluating
the technology. Encryption was ranked second (65%) and has been near
RAID alternatives
the top of storage managers’ priority lists for some time; however, this
year it looks like some of those past plans for data encryption have
carried through, as 60% are using encryption somewhere in the storage
infrastructure vs. 43% a couple of years ago.
As noted earlier, there’s renewed interest in file virtualization; 64%
have implemented it, will implement it or expect to evaluate it this year.
Primary storage data reduction garnered significant interest as well,
racking up 63% in its inaugural year on the list.
As storage managers set their sights on 2010 and beyond, it’s clear
that using their shop’s storage more efficiently will be Job No. 1 for
some time to come. 2
Rich Castagna (rcastagna@storagemagazine.com) is editorial director of the

Storage Media Group.
36 Storage May 2010

hot spots | terri mcclure
Taking control of storage
e
operational costs in 2010
The deep freeze in IT spending is starting
to thaw as IT organizations shift from
intentions survey
cost-reduction mode to cost containment.

Purchasing
ARLIER THIS YEAR, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) published its 2010 IT
Spending Intentions Survey, an in-depth study of 515 senior IT professionals
regarding their midmarket and enterprise organizations’ IT spending plans
and priorities for 2010. This year’s survey finds cautious optimism reigns
among IT shops: Most organizations are moving out of cost-reduction
mode, but are likely to characterize themselves as being in cost contain-
Hard disk update
ment, not growth, mode. That’s good

news for technology vendors as budgets Fifty-four percent of
begin to free up again. On the spending
front, survey participants indicate virtu- those surveyed will
alization, security and storage as their increase their spending
top areas for investment.
Among those organizations surveyed— on storage hardware
in the United States, Canada, France, this year, up from
Germany and United Kingdom—52% will
increase general IT spending this year 38% in 2009.
RAID alternatives
vs. only 43% in 2009. More importantly,

spending on data storage equipment looks promising: 54% of those surveyed
will increase their spending on storage hardware this year, up from 38% in
2009.
Storage spending in 2010 corresponds to the ongoing need to manage
explosive data growth, which is perennially identified in ESG’s spending
surveys as a top-five IT priority. Plans for increased spending on new raw
storage system purchases—whether SAN or NAS—might well indicate that
equipment purchases postponed in 2009 return to the top of the priority
list this year. Other top storage solutions cited by respondents as areas
of investment include data replication, storage virtualization, more power-

efficient hardware and data-reduction technologies.
For the second year in a row, respondents cited trimming operational
costs as the top criteria for justifying their IT spend. As users shift to cost-
containment mode from cost-reduction mode, it seems they’re poised to
spend capital dollars to save operationally. While reducing capital expenses
was second on the justification list in 2009, and tied with business process
improvement, it dropped to fifth on the list of justifications for IT spend in
37 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
2010 behind reducing operational costs, business process improvement,

improving security/risk management and return on investment (see Figure
1, this page). This also aligns with the
shift to cost-containment mode from As application environ-
cost-reduction mode.
Storage is a good place to begin look- ments grow and more
ing for areas to reduce operational costs. data needs to be stored,
intentions survey
Many IT shops make storage buys to

Purchasing
support each new application as it rolls we often see users

out. As application environments grow leveraging spread-
and more data needs to be stored, we
often see users leveraging spreadsheets sheets to map what
to map what application data lives on application data lives on
which storage devices. As the environ-
ment changes, new capacity comes on- which storage devices.
line, or storage systems are updated or
replaced, the spreadsheets need to be kept current so users know where
Hard disk update
important data is stored so they can ensure it is protected and backed up.
It can get very complex, and over time the chance that critical data is left
unprotected grows. Often, because of the complexity of the environment,
IT is unable to appropriately leverage storage capacity where and when it’s
needed and ends up with stranded capacity because it either doesn’t have
the right performance or availability characteristics for the next new appli-
cation coming online, or it needs file storage capacity but has space only
RAID alternatives
FIGURE 1: Which of the following considerations

do you believe will be most important in justifying
IT investments to your organization’s business
management team over the next 12-18 months?
2010 2009
Reduction in operational costs 54% 62%
Business process improvement 42% 37%
Improved security/risk management 36% 32%

Return on investment/Speed of payback 33% 31%
Reduction in capital costs 30% 37%
Improved regulatory compliance 23% 20%
Reduced time to market for our products/services 10% 17%
(Percent of respondents, 3 responses accepted) SOURCE: Enterprise Strategy Group
38 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
in block storage systems. It’s not unusual to see IT environments

with sub-50% utilization rates across the storage environment. That’s
a lot of floor space, power and cooling, and management cycles going
toward managing capacity that doesn’t directly support the business.
And it presents a clear opportunity for reducing operational costs.
There’s little question that 2009 was one of the toughest years in
intentions survey
recent history for the IT industry, with far-reaching budgetary implica-

tions for technology vendors and IT end users alike. While budgetary
Purchasing
pressures won’t let up in 2010, the shift from cost-reduction mode to

cost-containment mode bodes well for the technology sector in general.
As users continue to look for ways to reduce operating costs by reduc-
ing storage infrastructure complexity, those vendors that offer truly
efficient and easy-to-use platforms will benefit. Users have listened
to vendors push their storage efficiency message for the past year
and a half. But this year it needs to be more than a marketing message.
Users should demand that vendors demonstrate what they can do to
help address the storage complexity, and associated inefficiencies, that
Hard disk update
the vendors themselves have had a big part in creating. 2
Terri McClure is a storage analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, Milford, Mass.

RAID alternatives
39 Storage May 2010

snapshot
Storage tiering getting more automated

THE IDEA behind storage tiering is to put the right data in the right place and, in doing
so, hopefully save some money by freeing up expensive tier 1 storage. In our latest
poll, 50% of respondents said they’re currently using a tiered system in their storage
shops, almost exactly the same number as a year ago. Among the half who aren’t
currently tiering their storage, nearly two-thirds (63%) say tiering is, indeed, in their
future, with almost half of them expecting to implement it within a year. For the most
part, storage tierers like to keep things simple: 42% report they have two tiers, 34% have
intentions survey
three tiers and only 24% run more complex operations with four or more tiers. The most
Purchasing
popular choice for tier 1 storage is Fibre Channel (FC); 59% report their top tier as 4 Gbps
FC storage, and a fairly even split have 2 Gbps FC (23%) or 8 Gbps FC (21%) at the top
of their tiers. Creating the tiers is usually relatively easy, but moving the data from tier
to tier can be a toughie. Thirty-two percent use automation tools to get the job done—
a jump from last year’s 20%—but 54% migrate data manually or semi-automatically.
And a small contingent (14%) has solved the migration problem: they don’t move data
between tiers. —Rich Castagna
Hard disk update
How many tiers of disk storage do you use? What does your tier 1 storage consist of?
4 Gbps FC 59%
24% 2 Gbps FC 23%

Four or more
42% 8 Gbps FC 21%
Two
34% NAS 18%
Three
iSCSI with SAS 10%
RAID alternatives
iSCSI with SATA 10%

0% 10 20 30 40 50 60
%
26
What’s your biggest pain point related
to your tiered storage system?
36% Classifying data so that it’s sent

to the right tier
22% Moving data between tiers
19% Keeping track of where data
Have a tier 0 consisting currently resides
of solid-state storage 9% Poor performance on lower tiers
“I hate to remember how we operated before we had

tiered storage.”
—Survey respondent
40 Storage May 2010

STORAGE
Check out the following resources from our sponsors:
3PAR, page 7
intentions survey
3PAR Thin Provisioning: Eliminating Allocated but Unused Storage and Accelerating ROI
Purchasing
Taneja Group Report: 3PAR Thin Copy Desktop: A VDI Optimized Storage Solution
EMC, page 4
Optimizing Data Protection for Virtual Environments
Data Storage Priorities 2010: Data Backup, Capacity Growth and Disaster Recovery
Hard disk update
i365, A Seagate Company, page 10

Five Cost-Effective Ways to Enable Fast Recovery
The Keys to Disaster Recovery Planning: i365's EVault Disaster Recovery Solutions Help Protect You From Losing
Valuable Data Due to Complete Site Outage
Precise, page 12
RAID alternatives
The Business Impact of Tiered Storage Technology and Improving Application Performance
Business Awareness with Storage Tiering: Improve Application Performance and Control Storage Costs
41 Storage May 2010

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Managing the information that drives the enterprise

STORAGE Vol. 9 No. 3 May 2010

2 Storage May 2010

The Business of Storage

Hard Disk Drive Technology Trends

Storage Managers Can Reach for Their Wallets Again

Taking Control of Storage Operational Costs in 2010

Storage Tiering Getting More Automated

3 Storage May 2010 Cover illustration by ENRICO VARRASSO

“EMC deduplication storage provides superb

“Unlike our older backup and disaster recovery processes, the

Next-generation backup starts now.

Next starts now. To learn more visit www.EMC.com/uk

VERYONE KNOWS that to stay current, a storage manager needs to keep

a little more prominently.

Rich Castagna (rcastagna@storagemagazine.com) is editorial director of the

6 Storage May 2010

The Get Thin Guarantee: Save 50% with a Technology Refresh

3 Experience Capacity Savings of 50% or More

For More Information Contact your 3PAR Representative today: www.3PAR.com/GetThin

3PAR Inc. | 4209 Technology Drive, Fremont, CA 94538 | 510.413.5999 | www.3PAR.com

and it’s not hard to see how easily file sprawl

provide enterprise-class NAS products, so users have a limited num-

8 Storage May 2010

IS UNSTRUCTURED ANOTHER WORD FOR USELESS?

we don’t dare delete it because there’s

always the risk that it will be needed some

unstructured content seem synonymous

BACKUP GETS EVEN HARDER

and solving—or forestalling—the problem by throwing more IT infrastruc-

Tony Asaro is senior analyst and founder of Voices of IT (www.VoicesofIT.com).

9 Storage May 2010

Actually, since 1997. But in the IT realm,

WAN-optimized backup performance. End-to-end encrypted security. Assured recovery

Making the Case for

Solid-State Storage SharePoint Data V: Backup and

Interest in solid-state More and more companies Recovery Software

And don’t miss our monthly columns and commentary,

TechTarget Storage Media Group

Kim Hefner Beth Pariseau

11 Storage May 2010

Automated Business Storage Tiering

 Predict business impact of storage tiering decisions

Be sure to read the EMC Whitepaper:

See Precise at EMC World 2010, Booth #220

The various forms

EDUNDANT ARRAY of independent disks (RAID) has been the

a proven and reliable method that’s considered a basic data

13 Storage May 2010

RAID SHORTCOMINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

It takes a lot of HDDs to keep up

with the rapid growth rate of data

Even high-performance SAS and Fibre between 50% and 62%

sets simplifies protection and recovery of the data but at a severe

14 Storage May 2010

TRADITIONAL RAID LEVELS

RAID 2 • Data protected by error correcting codes (ECCs) 1 Standard

• Provides more usable storage than RAID 1 or 10

15 Storage May 2010

dramatically. Longer data reconstruction times typically equate to signifi-

hit if two drives must be reconstructed simultaneously from the same

HDD fails or a non-recoverable read error occurs during the rebuild.

16 Storage May 2010

Predict business impact of storage tiering decisions